[OSGeo-Discuss] [Marketing] Proprietary GIS on our OSGeo website

[Miles Fidelman]

Jody,

This is a very good point.

(comments continue below...)

On 9/20/17 1:19 PM, Jody Garnett wrote:
> On 20 September 2017 at 12:44, Maria Antonia Brovelli 
> <maria.brovelli at polimi.it <mailto:maria.brovelli at polimi.it>> wrote:
>
>     Jody this is not respectful of me and the community.  Might I know
>     why the people working for the project want ABSOLUTELY to keep the
>     names and links to proprietary software on our open source
>     software website?
>
>
> I feel a bit of pressure to express myself exactly correctly on this 
> outreach topic; or risk people missing the point ...  The outreach 
> approach was determined months ago when going over our target audience 
> (literally what the website is for). Te website was defined with these 
> visitor journey's in mind...
>
> The primary audience for the website is non-community members:
> - ESRI GIS Professional (GISP), IT Professionals, Academic Faculty, 
> Academic Students, Science and Research, Influencers & Decision 
> makers, Software Developers
> - the communication goal is to promote awareness - asking 
> non-community members to consider and evaluate
> - the next goal is adoption - assisting non-community members in 
> adopting open source
> - the final foal is impress - having non-community members be 
> enthusiastic and advocate open source
>
> The secondary audience is community members:
> - osgeo members, partners, service providers, sponsors, contributors
> - the steps awarness, adoption, impress reflect contributing to open 
> source
> - many of the community member activities are taking place on the wiki 
> and are happy to remain there.
>

When talking to the broader GIS community, it's important to keep in 
mind two things:

- most GIS users are more familiar with ESRI & Google tools

- most of what passes for standards are either defacto (ESRI & Google 
formats & APIs), or developed by OGC - which is an industry consortium

- lots of folks utilize a combination of tools - some open source, some 
not (e.g., folks who use MapServer to serve databases maintained on ArcGIS).

Taken together, if the intent of the site is to educate & support GIS 
users, and promote open source geo tools - then the site really has to 
address compatibility, and hybrid environments.  Links to commercial 
equivalents - perhaps with reviews and comparisons - provides a lot of 
value (e.g., when trying to figure out how to use OpenLayers to view 
layers that come from a mix of ESRI, Google, and OGC-compliant sources.

Miles Fidelman



-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

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